Tuesday Weld

            When I got up on Friday morning, even though it was past the middle of May, the heat in my apartment was on full blast. I did not expect the landlord to still have the furnace working this late in the spring. If I had known the furnace was still on it would have been my fault that the heat started going overnight. Thursday had been a very warm day and so for the first time this year I propped open the back to allow some air to blow in. If I’d known the furnace was still on I would have shut the back door at bedtime, but because I didn’t the cool night air touched the meter on the thermostat and activated the heater even though we didn’t need to be warmed up.

I sweated through yoga with just two windows yawning but for song practice I opened every one and even opened my apartment door a little bit. At around 9:00 I just closed the back door in hopes that it would warm up the hall enough to turn off the furnace. After a couple of hours it did shut down.

I spent a lot of the day writing about what happened on Thursday. Since one of the things that happened was a broken spoke I didn’t take a bike ride in the late afternoon.

That night I watched the first two episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Both of them opened with Dobie sitting on a park bench in front of a copy of Rodin’s The Thinker and the opening joke is that Dobie is also posing like The Thinker, except that all he thinks about is girls. The girl that Dobie mostly thinks about in the first two shows is Thalia (played by Tuesday Weld). He also thinks about money because a boy can’t get a girl without money. He complains to his friend Maynard G. Krebs that his father won’t give him any money and Maynard responds, “What are ya gonna do? We’re the beat generation!” In this case he uses the word “beat” to mean “defeated”. Thalia is only interested in money but she claims that her reasons are honourable because her father has a kidney condition, her mother isn’t getting any younger and her brothers will never amount to anything and so she is the only hope for her family if she manages to marry rich. Dobie meets Thalia on jackpot night at the movies when she asks him to go halves on their two tickets so if either of their numbers win they would get $50 each. After the movie the host comes out with the box of tickets and gets someone in the front row to pick one. Dobie’s friend Maynard always sits in the front and so he picks the number, tells it to the host and puts it back in the box, but neither Thalia nor Dobie win.

Thalia wants to go to the prom but it costs $5 plus the prices of a corsage and a taxi to and from the dance. Dobie says he will take her even though he doesn’t have any money. Maynard proposes a plan that on the next jackpot night at the movies, when he is asked to pick a number he will call out Dobie’s number and since the host doesn’t double check the ticket they’ll be able to get away with $50 each.

That night though, Dobie has an attack of conscience and so when his number is called as the winner, he doesn’t answer and so the host chooses another number. Then Maynard comes to sit beside him and asks, “Did I miss the draw?” Maynard wasn’t there, the reason being that the cops arrested him because the dirty, rumpled clothing he wears make him look like a vagrant. Dobie realizes that he’d actually legitimately won the $199 but threw his opportunity away.

The second episode wasn’t as complex. It introduced the new character of Milton Armitage, who looked very familiar. Milton bore a striking resemblance to Warren Beatty but since I’d never seen the actor so young, I wasn’t absolutely sure. It turns out that Milton was played by Warren Beatty and I wondered why I’d never heard that Beatty had been in the Dobie Gillis show. Milton is rich and the only student that wears suits to school. When Dobie sees Thalia go gaga over Milton’s fashions he has to find a way to compete without money. He convinces the local haberdasher, Mr. Zigler, who expresses frustration that teenagers never buy his suits, to let Dobie be his model to show off his suits at school. So every day Thalia is thrilled in class by a fashion war between Dobie and Milton as they try to outdo themselves and each other with increasingly more ridiculous suits. Finally Thalia declares Dobie the winner of the sartorial contest and when Milton tells her how Dobie has been getting his suits she thinks it’s even better because it means he is showing initiative. She declares that Milton could always lose his wealth and have nothing to show for it but someone with initiative always has potential. But when Thalia finds out that Mr Zigler isn’t paying Dobie to advertise for him she makes him go to the store and demand payment, which results in the end of him having nice clothes to wear.

Maynard, who this time is wearing the same dirty clothes as in the first episode, but now has holes in his shirt, consoles Dobie by telling him. “Clothes are no good! They’re like a prison! I mean they squeeze ya, hem ya in! A guy outta be like free! Now you take animals. Name me one animal who wears clothes!” Dobie responds, “Name me one animal that listens to Dizzy Gillespie.” Maynard frowns thoughtfully, “I never thought about that!”

Mr. Zigler is played by Mel Blanc: the voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and many others.

Although it’s obvious that the characters of “Scooby Doo Where Are You?” were based on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, it seems to me that Dobie Gillis and his friends are loosely based on Archie Andrews and his supporting characters from the Archie comics. Dobie is Archie, Maynard is a beatnik version of Jughead, Thalia is a blonde Veronica and Milton is Reggie. The Archie comics were first published in 1941 and the Dobie Gillis short stories started coming out in 1945. Maynard’s character was created entirely for the TV series though and apparently the writer, Max Shulman, looking for a Beatnik character, did research by hanging around Beatnik coffee houses before he came up with a stereotype that became Maynard G. Krebs.